PRISM - a design for scalable shared memory

PRISM is a distributed shared-memory architecture that relies on a unified hardware and operating system structure for scalable and reliable performance. It consists of multiple connected shared memory multiprocessors, each controlled by its own kernel. Hardware and software are used to support coherent global shared memory segments, on top of this distributed architecture. PRISM's hardware provides flexible management and dynamic configuration of shared memory pages with different behaviors and supports a number of Simple-COMA cache control operations. PRISM's system structure minimizes the amount of global coordination when managing shared memory. The structure also provides natural fault containment boundaries around each node.